Amazon Kindle, UK

Wednesday, 7 March 2012

March 7th in Queer History

Born this day

Leslie Hutchinson(1900 – 1969) UK / Grenada
Musician was one of the biggest cabaret stars in the world during the 1920s and 1930s. Hutch may have been secretly bisexual and was alleged to have had relationships with Ivor Novello, Merle Oberon, and actress Tallulah Bankhead - an openly bisexual Golden Age Hollywood actress. It is rumoured he had affairs with Edwina Mountbatten and members of the British Royal Family, which supposedly led to his social ostracism and the destruction of his professional career.

Issan Dorsey(1933 – 1990) US
Sōtō Zen monk and teacher, Dharma heir of Zentatsu Richard Baker and onetime abbot of Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro district of San Francisco, California. Earlier in his life he had worked as a prostitute and a drag queen, and had struggled at times with drug addiction. He died of complications from AIDS in 1990.
He established the Maitri Hospice at HSZC for students and friends dying of AIDS during the spread of the epidemic in the 1980s—the first Buddhist hospice of its kind in the United States. Numbers of his students and colleagues have observed that Dorsey was the embodiment of a bodhisattva.

Bill Brochtrup (1963 – ) US
Film, television, and stage actor. He is known for playing "PAA John Irvin", the gay administrative aide, on NYPD Blue. When asked an interview in 2002 whether or not he was gay, Ellis explained that he does not identify himself as gay or straight. He explained that he is comfortable to be thought of as gay, bisexual or heterosexual and that he enjoys playing with his persona, identifying variously as gay, straight and bi to different people over the years.

Bret Easton Ellis(1964 - ) US
Novelist and short story writer, whose works have been translated into 27 different languages.

Wanda Sykes(1964 – ) US
Writer, stand-up comedian, actress, and voice artist. She earned the 1999 Emmy Award for her writing on The Chris Rock Show, and in 2004 Entertainment Weekly named Sykes as one of the 25 funniest people in America.
In November 2008, she publicly came out as lesbian while at a same-sex marriage rally in Las Vegas regarding Proposition 8. Since the disappointment of the result,she continued to be active in same-sex marriage aactivism, hosting events and emceeing fundraisers.

Jean-Pierre Barda(1967 – ) Swedish
A singer, actor, make up artist and hair dresser of Algerian descent. He is most notable for being one of the founding members of the pop group Army of Lovers.

Darryl Stephens (1974 – ) US
Actor. He is best known for playing Noah Nicholson on the television dramedy Noah's Arc. Although Stephens is reluctant to discuss his personal life, he is openly gay and his roles address issues of classism and sexuality

Mia Hundvin (1977 – ) Norwegian
One of Norway's most successful professional team handball players. In 2000 she entered a registered partnership with Danish handball player Camilla Andersen, but divorced her three years later. Sports Illustrated ran a lengthy feature on the two, who are much-discussed celebrities in their countries. According to Sports Illustrated, Andersen had been the lover of handball legend Anja Andersen after they won the gold for Denmark in 1996.

Azis (1978 – ) Bulgarian
A Romani chalga (pop-folk) singer known for, among other things, his atypical gender expression and his flamboyant persona. He launched a political career in 2005 as a member of the Evroroma political party and ran in the general elections campaign in the summer of 2005, but did not receive enough votes to become a member of Parliament.

Kevin McDaid (1984 – ) UK
Born in Nigeriaand brought up in England, McDaid was best known as member of the British boy band V. Whilst he was still an unknown,McDaid posed in explicit nude photographs for an amateur porn website. He is the long-term boyfriend of Westlife member Mark Feehily.

Died this day

Arthur Cecil Pigou(1877 - 1959) UK
Economist, who as a teacher and builder of the school of economics at the University of Cambridge he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to fill chairs of economics around the world.

Alice B Toklas(1877 - 1967) US
Author and art patron, and a member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century. Together, she and her partner Gertrude Stein hosted a salon that attracted expatriate American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder and Sherwood Anderson, and avant-garde painters, including Picasso, Matisse, and Braque. Her name is featured in Stein's memoir of their world, "The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas", but in fact the book is not an autobiography at all. It was not written by Toklas, and has very little of her own life in it.
After the death of Gertrude Stein, Toklas published her own literary memoir, under the title The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. The most famous recipe therein was called "Haschich Fudge," a mixture of fruit, nuts, spices, and "canibus sativa," or marijuana. Her name was later lent to the range of cannabis concoctions called Alice B. Toklas brownies.

Richard Montague (1930 - 1971) US
Mathematician and philosopher, who was also an accomplished organist and a successful real estate investor.
He died violently in his own home, in a crime unsolved to this day. One theory is that he had a habit of cruising the bars. On the day that he was murdered, he brought home several people "for some kind of soirée", but they instead robbed his house and strangled him.

Claude Vivier (1948 - 1983), Canadian
Composer, who was stabbed to death in his Paris apartment by a male prostitute he had met in a bar earlier that evening.

Divine [Harris Glenn Milstead] (1945 - 1988) US
Drag Queen, singer and actor, who was described by People magazine as the "Drag Queen of the Century". The fat fabulous drag queen, immortalized by director John Waters in such films as "Mondo Trasho", "Pink Flamingos", and "Female Trouble", once described himself as "just another man in a dress."

Paul Winfield (1939 - 2004) US
Television, film, and stage actor. He was known for his portrayal of a Louisiana sharecropper who struggles to support his family during the Great Depression in the landmark film Sounder which earned him an Academy Award nomination. Winfield portrayed Captain Terrell of the Starship Reliant in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and he also portrayed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the television miniseries King, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award.

Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo(1936 - 2008) Spanish
Known as the La Duquesa Roja or The Red Duchess, she was the 21st Duchess of Medina Sidonia, Grandee of Spain, and the holder of the ducal title Medina-Sidonia.
Although she was once married and the mother of three children, hours before her death, Luisa Isabel married Liliana Maria Dahlamann in a civil ceremony. Today, the Dowager Duchess Maria,[3] her legal widow, serves as life-president of the Fundación Casa Medina Sidonia.

Sodomy in history, March 7th

1811 — Ensign John Hepburn and drummer Thomas White are hanged for consensual sodomy by the English Navy before "a vast concourse of spectators" including nobles.

1899 — New Hampshire amends its sodomy law to prohibit all "unnatural and lascivious acts," to include oral sex.

1921 — The Washington Supreme Court overturns an earlier decision and rules that an "attempt" to commit sodomy necessarily constitutes an "assault" to commit it.

1934 — The Soviet Union reinstates consensual sodomy as a crime, with a penalty of up to five years in prison, if with consent, and eight years at hard labor, if without